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My job of calling out worthwhile investment articles found on other financial sites gets very difficult this time of year. And it won't get any easier until depleted late-summer newsrooms bulk up again after Labor Day.

Yahoo! Finance

The yield is calculated by taking the sum of a stock's dividend yield with its "buyback yield" to show what percentage of total cash the company is paying out to shareholders, "either in the form of a cash dividend or expended cash to repurchase its shares in the open market."

So what, you ask, is a buyback yield? According to O'Shaughnessy, that's calculated by contrasting shares outstanding today with those outstanding one year earlier. "If a stock has 90 shares outstanding today and had 100 outstanding a year earlier, it would have a buyback yield of 10 percent, which you derive by dividing the 10 fewer shares by the 100 from a year earlier. Conversely, if a stock has 100 shares outstanding today while it had 90 shares outstanding one year earlier, it has a buyback yield of -11 percent, indicating that the company has issued additional shares," he writes.

O'Shaughnessy's piece then cites historical data showing that a basket of stocks with high shareholder yields outperformed a basket of stocks in general. Conversely, a basket of stocks with low "shareholder yields" underperformed the averages.

"Agricultural prices have been bashed, smashed and trashed very hard over the last several months," according to the blog. "During the last few weeks we have covered these conditions and focused on the oversold grain prices as well as the battered down Cotton. Now we look at the overall complex as a whole, as it continues to suffer and moves towards 52 week new lows."

The blog post continues, "the key in buying a bottom is to let the selling pressure exhaust itself. We are definitely coming closer to that point. So far, I have not purchased any new agricultural positions just yet, but I am getting ready to do so soon enough."